Just finished refreshing my old DarkBlog theme to run under newest BlogEngine 1.5 release. It has been neglected for quiet some time now, I had to add widgets support, nested comments and few tweaks here and there to play nice with new features added to BlogEngine since version 1.3 when this theme was introduces. It looks pretty good with standard “welcome” post, but when tested with my own blog content, some things do not look right. Nothing is wrong with theme though, the problem is content itself - which prompted me to write a note to myself: More...

With BE.NET 1.5 release candidate out of the door, it is a good time to look at some of the new features. Most of them are small and incremental, but nevertheless are interesting. One such feature is support for compiled extensions. There are several reasons you want to compile extension rather than provide source code, such as security, protecting intellectual property, simplifying deployment (for large extensions) etc. If you find a reason to choose this route, this guide is for you. More...

Either you run your web site in the shared hosting environment or on your local IIS server, you likely have several ASP.NET applications running in the same root directory. Each of them can be configured as a separate web application and run totally independent from others. Although BlogEngine is not (yet) multi-blogging platform, you can easily run bunch of BlogEngins on the same root for number of bloggers. Lets say, you have 3 bloggers contributing to your site and you want each of them have their very own blog, then you create similar structure: More...

Feedjit is a service that provides live traffic feed for your site. It is easy to set up – you copy chunk of HTML and insert it into your blog’s markup. That is, if you know HTML and used to editing files in your blog, which shouldn’t be a requirement for average blogger. This is why popular blog providers supply Feedjit widgets – so that blogger does not have to edit files by hand and FTP them to the host. In this little exercise we create such a widget for BlogEngine. More...

After using Commentor for almost three month now, I’m refreshing it with new version based on users feedback and my own experience. It saved me a lot of time so far catching almost 200 spam comments that I would have to remove manually otherwise. Even though I’m very satisfied with how it works, I hope new and improved version will be much better. Here is some of the key features that has been added or changed. More...

When you have lots of pages on your blog, moving through using just “next” and “previous” buttons doesn’t cut it. It seems like a small thing, but if you look at most sophisticated web 2.0-style sites with large volume of content, they all go into the long way to provide good navigation. Because it is important for your users to feel good, and some get really dizzy when they don’t understand where they are. I made this control to provide such a post navigation for BlogEngine blogs. The best way to understand how it works is to take a look at the picture below. More...

There is new extension in town. It is built on Picasa SlideShow, but it adds web album functionality to it, this is why I decided to package it as separate extension. After all, it is not a slide-show any more, not just SlideShow at least, so I did not want name to cause a confusion. I also bundled it with LightBox – it uses it to transform thumbnails into larger pictures. It is optional, and if you opt to, you can ignore LightBox files when coping extension to your blog. Installation process is basically the same, you just copy files to corresponding locations and then go to Extensions/Edit section. More...

Sometimes you have an extension that you want to respond to events before all the others. Or may be you have two extensions that depend on each other and one should always fire before the other. It is not a common scenario, but I did run into it more then once and had to come up with less than perfect workarounds to resolve this. It would be nice to know in advance in what order extensions will respond to events, and now you can. More...

The dfMarine theme has been updated with sliding widgets. No, I did not become a [w:jQuery] expert just yet - it is mostly courtesy of Chris Blankenship, I used his AnimatedCollapse extension and it did the job exactly the way I wanted. I did run into problem with [W:jQuery] using “$” function, it has a conflict with other JS I run on my site where this same thing used a little bit differently. But it was easy enough to ask jQuery switch to using “$j” instead, so that conflict was happily resolved. More...

With Christmas just around the corner I wanted to share something good with BE community to keep the spirit alive :) I hope you’ll like this new theme, it is widgets ready and should work fine with BE 1.4 and up. I think I covered all (or almost all) widgets in CSS, so it should look decent with your site out of the box. One thing I left out is accordion for side bar – all those widgets on the right should slide up and down on title click. Mostly because I want to finally get into jQuery and this is as good reason for me as any to get started, so I’ll upgrade it to accordion when I’ll become proficient enough with this JavaScript library. More...